Other 2018 releases I played: Some Destiny 2 expansions, and a handful of smutty visual novels that mostly started with “Sakura”. Also a 2-D action game called Icey and a game called “Nostalgic Train”, all about walking around an abandoned Japanese town interacting with the memories of people who used to live there.

I would also like to switch the positions of my top 2 games of 2017. A year ago, it was Horizon Zero Dawn (#1) and Nioh (#2) and, well… I spent the last couple of weeks of December and the first day of January getting back into Nioh so I could play the DLC expansions, and then wrapping up miscellaneous trophies so I could add the Nioh platinum trophy to my virtual trophy case and in retrospect I think I liked it more than Horizon.

Major gaming accomplishments of the year: I spent a solid month wallowing in Halo lore and now understand just what the heck happened in the latest couple of Halo games. I replayed the MassEffect trilogy, this time with all of the DLC. I got four platinum trophies, though admittedly three of them were for really kinda forgettable Love Live! rhythm games.

Oh, and I finally got over the grudge I’ve held against the Assassin’s Creed series since 2013 and played like four Assassin’s Creed games.

I finished off my backlogs for PS3, Vita, Wii, WiiU, and Xbox 360, so I got to unhook a bunch of systems and stick them in a footlocker. Sadly I then boughtthreemore Xbox 360 games but they are backwards compatible and are even Xbox One X enhanced so I can pretend they’re really Xbone games.

I played a bunch of 2017 Switch games in 2018. Most notable was probably Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which could have been maybe a tiny bit shorter and could have explained its combat systems just a little better, but whatever. It had a lot of heart to it. I also had a surprising amount of fun with Mario Kart 8 DX.

I also made a blog post almost exactly one year ago where I detailed the eleven games I was going to let myself buy in the new year, and as of last week I had actually played through all eleven of them. I have mostly stopped buying games that I’m never going to play!

I also stopped buying physical games, which has definitely helped somewhat with the clutter and which also saves me a few minutes at the grocery store each visit since I no longer find myself mysteriously checking out the home entertainment aisle looking for sales.

I played a ton of Overwatch. From the back of an exercise bike. And got my blood pressure down from “hey, you know how you have a family history of heart problems? You’re right on track to have your own!” to “wow, you’re actually in a healthy range. Keep it up!”

Well, honestly, I should probably play fewer games. Fortunately, I have fewer to play! There are 64 games in my backlog and many of them are quite short. Nine of them are Kingdom Hearts games since I got all of the pre-KH3 games by preordering KH3, so some of those may get written off since I played them on the PS2 and PSP.

Instead, I should get back to actually working on my Japanese. I spent a solid four years of school getting my degree in the language and I’m still… reasonably competent but I have not pushed myself to practice. So that’s one goal for 2019 that’s a little more noble than playing video games.